Haruki Murakami

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mind-bending new collection of short stories from the internationally acclaimed author of NORWEGIAN WOOD

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Abandoning a Cat

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A beautifully illustrated edition of international bestseller, Haruki Murakami's, meditation on memory and family. 
 
‘It’s the accumulation of insignificant things that has made me the person I am.’ 
 
In this meditation on memory and what makes us who we are Haruki recalls his relationship with his father. When Haruki was six his father took him on a bike ride to a nearby beach to abandon their cat. Haruki can no longer remember why his father wanted to do this but when they arrived home to find the cat back before them he recalls how his father respected this and let the cat stay. He goes on to consider how his father’s upbringing and experience as a soldier may have caused the distance that grew between them for twenty years, and only ended with Haruki’s visit to his father’s deathbed. 
 
‘All we can do is breathe the air of the period we live in, carry with us the special burdens of the time, and grow up within those confines.’

A moving reflection on the author's father - plus a cat! - this is a beautiful short work of family history from one of our most beloved, iconic writers. 
 
Originally published in the New Yorker in 2019, and now presented in a full, unabridged form, Abandoning a Cat is a poignant, self-reflective work by Haruki Murakami. 
 
Here he writes about his father, the son of a priest who might have become a priest himself had a clerical error not sent him into the second world war. Murakami's father wrote accomplished haiku and eventually became a teacher. As Haruki grew older and became an adult and then a writer, he and his father found they had little in common. They were later estranged for twenty years, only reconciling on his father's deathbed. 
 
This haunting personal essay is a reflection on what it means to be a father and what it means to be a son - on what it means to be loved and to be abandoned - and also on a particular moment of Japanese history, through the aftermath of the second world war on into the present. Murakami fans may find common themes from beloved novels such as Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - but will also be surprised by the raw honesty of this beautiful autobiographical piece. 
 
'Haunting' New York Times

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, that turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. 
 
In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and Men Without Women, Murakami's distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring his place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

Abandoning a Cat

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